Surgery reduces epileptic seizures

Surgery can give long term relief from seizures for a proportion of epileptic patients, a cohort study has found. Doctors found that five years after anterior temporal lobectomy was performed on 89 patients with refractory epilepsy, 80 of them (90%) were free of seizures or had less than a fifth of the seizures that they had before the operation.

Doctors from the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at the University of Pennsylvania conclude in this week's JAMA (1996;276:470-5) that all patients with intractable epilepsy should be assessed for surgery as soon as the nature of their condition is …